3 ideas
Reading an ordinary family's complete two-way correspondence surfaces the reasoning behind migration: remittances, job leads, marriage choices, and whether to return home. Aggregate statistics show flows of people but hide how those choices were negotiated, delayed, and reversed within one household over two decades.
Emigrant children abroad and parents in the home village operated as a single household economy, coordinating money, labor, land, and information across the Atlantic. Letters worked as the management channel for this economy, carrying requests, accounts, and instructions that kept the dispersed family functioning as one enterprise.
Over time, emigrant children put down roots through work, marriage, and local networks in their new countries, and their interests and outlook diverge from those of the parents who stayed. Parental authority and the shared plan to return home weaken gradually, until the emigrants' main loyalty shifts to the family they have built abroad.